


Devil's Dance

by Epiphanyx7



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Crack, Dancing, Dysfunctional Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-26
Updated: 2009-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-01 01:13:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epiphanyx7/pseuds/Epiphanyx7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's right, too. He's been on stage for thirty seconds and the panel is staring at him with cold, expressionless eyes, and Dean wishes he were up against a werewolf or a Wendigo, something he knew how to fight. He stands in his sweats and his bare feet and thinks, <em>well, fuck them, anyway</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Devil's Dance

**Author's Note:**

> A Mary Winchester AU. Mary didn't die, John did. Dean and Sam's lives are... different. A.K.A. the one where Dean Winchester goes to Julliard.
> 
> Now, other people, write this premise too! (Just the John's Dead, Mary-Raises the Boys bits, I mean.) The premise might be crack, but the story is not.

  


The thing about Mary Winchester, née Campbell, is, she's _really good_ at what she does.

And while there is a lot of stuff that she can do - she cooks and cleans, can do a back flip and a triple axle, and she takes care of her kids like nobody's business - the other thing that she does is hunt things. She was raised and trained as a Hunter, capitalization included. She doesn't make stupid guesses, doesn't live in motel rooms, doesn't pretend to be a traveling salesman. She sues the gas company and wins, and with the life insurance policy, her husband's death pays their way for the next fifteen years. She wants them to have a real life, a normal life, and so instead of dragging her children all around the country, she finds a place and sets up a base camp.

They move around all the time, every couple of months, but she tries to stay in one place for the school year, even though she gets more and more paranoid as they approach finals. Mary doesn't tell them everything, doesn't explain the hunted, tense look or why she's so fixated on John's death, but she doesn't have to. Sam and Dean both know that Dad didn't die in a normal fire, and they both know that Mom is going to kill the demon that killed him.

She is terrified, and Dean can tell, when she looks at Sam and gets a pinched look on her face. Her eyes purse and lines appear beside her eyes, between her eyebrows. She looks older, and she never looks like that at Dean. He isn't sure if he should be relieved.

Mary Winchester, she's a smart gal, she KNEW what she was up against and she was, rightly, fucking terrified. Single mother, two children, and the knowledge that a demon killed her husband.

She doesn't want her boys involved -- and she won't let them be, not for a really long time.

But we all know Dean, don't we? The thing is, Dean does what he's told -- most of the time. Unfortunately for Mary (but fortunately for all the people he's saved), Dean's quick to disobey her instructions. (They're not _orders_ , because she is Not Like That) but we all know that when Dean's mother is going out to fight monsters, he's worried about her. Not about Sammy, because Mary's competent and smart and his babysitter is a psychic trained in the Art Of Kickassery. It doesn't seem to matter, though, because as soon as he's old enough to figure out that his mother is putting herself into danger (four years old, he can remember standing outside and looking at the house and asking "Where's Dad?") Dean's hero complex won't LET him do nothing.

So he gets rebellious, starts sneaking out -- nothing serious, just busting up a few ghosts or some shit, things his mom won't have to deal with later -- and she should be grateful, but it just makes her pissed off and angry. She doesn't like Dean going behind her back and putting himself in danger.

-

Thirteen years old and killing a ghoul for the first time, heart pounding in his chest, looking up at his mother and realizing that she's not proud of him, she's pissed off.

"You could have been killed," She says, angry, and Dean doesn't point out that he saved her life, or that if she'd let him have a gun of his own, he wouldn't have been in any danger at all. "You can't be reckless, Dean -- what would have happened if--"

"What, like it's any different from what _you're_ doing?" Dean says angrily, and they don't talk for two weeks aside from terse, painfully polite words spoken at the dinner table while Sammy looks confusedly between the two of them.

"Pass the salt, please, Dean," Mary says, and Dean resists the urge to throw it in her face.

-

Mary's a good mom, she never lies to them or pretends that she's doing anything other than what she's doing -- even Sammy knew, by the age of three, to line his bedroom with salt when he had nightmares so that the monsters couldn't get him. He could draw a Solomon Seal by the time he was six -- and that took a fuck load of explaining to the teachers in kindergarten, until Mary started talking about pattern recognition and analysis and Sammy's savant-like abilities, implying that Sam was 'special'. After that, Sammy got to spend an hour with a Spec. Ed. teacher every day who decided he was a genius and got to skip a grade or two.

Dean wasn't jealous, or anything, but he couldn't help but hate the fact that while Mary doted on him, gave him things -- leather jackets, the freaking _Impala_ (and that had been pretty fucking sweet, his sixteenth birthday and she gives him a classic car in pristine condition with nothing but an offhand, _"Take it, Dean, your father wanted you to have it --"_ ) she actually gets along with Sam. They don't fight, don't argue, and for some reason Sammy's happy and doesn't seem to feel the same urge Dean does, to _fight_ and be _useful_ , to save people. There are monsters out there, honest-to-fucking-god Monsters that are _killing people_ , and Mary seems to think that Dean's too much of a pussy to handle them.  (Which, by the way, is not true, he's totally getting better even though he usually gets his ass kicked and really, his ability to get flick his lighter only once to provide a flame has saved his life more times than he'd care to count.)

Dean does the only thing he can do.

He gets out.

As soon as he finishes high school, it's a done deal. He managed to keep it all quiet, get a post office box for his mail so his mom or Sammy wouldn't see it. He keeps everything locked away in the trunk of the Impala, doesn't tell his mom what he's planning.

He hadn't even really been planning all that well, in retrospect, it had been pure adolescent rage and a driving edge of desperation, sitting in the school counselor's office and filling out forms after forms, applying to schools he'd never even heard of. "U of T?" the hapless guidance counselor had suggested, and Dean had applied there as well.

His transcript was a giant fucking mess, sudden moves in the middle of the school year, his mother's paranoia bleeding into his life by making it impossible for him to finish learning about fractions or polynomials or the end of Midsummer Night's dream. His marks are abysmal to middling, although he's managed good grades in Gym (useless) and Drama (equally useless) and his list of extra-curricular activities is longer than his arm. No sports, nothing team-oriented, because moving away would mean letting the team down before the big game/meet/tournament, but every club has once been graced by Dean's presence, he's good at making friends on a whim and leaving them in the dust when Mary drags him and Sam to another part of Kansas to try piecing their lives back together.

-

The audition is a joke, Dean almost doesn't get the letter in time and even then, he's got no time to prepare. He walks in and shrugs off his leather jacket, realizing that he stands out because everyone else has tried to look professional or creepily adult, and he's none of those things dressed in too-thin sweatpants and a faded Zeppelin t-shirt. He glowers at anyone who tries to talk to him and waits for his turn, which he already knows is going to go badly.

He's right, too. He's been on stage for thirty seconds and the panel is staring at him with cold, expressionless eyes, and Dean wishes he were up against a werewolf or a Wendigo, something he knew how to fight. He stands in his sweats and his bare feet and thinks, _well, fuck them, anyway_.

He doesn't give them a pansy-assed speech about who he is or why this is so fucking important to him, because he tells himself it's not fucking important at all. Hits the music. Lets the first few bars wash over him -- Metallica, none of that classic instrumental sappy shit for him -- and he moves over the stage, improvising as he goes. It's everything that's him, and not his mom, everything that he's had to hide from Sammy or lie to his friends about. It's anger that his mother couldn't have fucking lied to him, couldn't have protected them, instead of having that steely, obsessed look in her eyes as she searched for their father's killer.

It's Dean's body telling him where to be, how to move, like every fight up against a restless angry spirit, when he can stop thinking and let go. And so he does, he lets go, performs and throws himself into it, body and mind and soul, and its rage and anger and something else, too, split leaps and a set of perfectly executed _fouettés_ that make sense because Dean spent six months in Kansas City searching the studio so that he could waste the ghost haunting it.

When the song's over Dean blinks back angry, furious tears and stares at the panel of judges.

They stare back at him.

"Were you classically trained?" One of them, a grey-haired woman on the left, asks. She's too thin, gives the impression that a stiff wind will snap her spine, or perhaps just the weight of her head could do that.

"We moved around a lot," Dean said. "I never really got to stay in classes for that long," and he stops, there, because he's never been comfortable lying straight-up to people, he's too blunt and straightforward to really get away with it. What he means, of course, is " _I fucked a ballet teacher last year, and used to fool around with these two girls who were into threesomes, acro, and interpretive dance._ " Once, he'd sat in on a jazz class and fallen asleep, bored.

"I see," the woman says, and she doesn't even bother to ask him to perform his monologue, which is just fucking fine with Dean, who hadn't even bothered to memorize it properly anyway.

-

So when the acceptance letter comes, complete with the offer for a scholarship that might very well pay his way through his entire first year at Julliard, nobody's more shocked than Dean.

Except, perhaps, for Mary. (And Sammy, but Sammy's a fuck ton of a better liar than Dean has ever been, and he doesn't let it show.)

Dean doesn't tell her until he's ready to leave. And then it's not so much of an informative _"I'm leaving to go to Julliard, because they offered me a scholarship,"_ as it is a stupidly ill-timed and ill-phrased, _"I'm going to fight Monsters in New York,"_ at which Mary Winchester unsurprisingly flips her fucking shit and spends three hours screaming at her oldest son.

Dean manages to hold it together while he packs his things, even though Sammy's hovering in the doorway looking tall and thin as a flagpole, almost Dean's height already (and shit, when the boy grows up he's going to be tall, Dean thinks) and handing him things silently to be packed away in the second-hand suitcase Dean picked up at a thrift store.

He packs his clothes and his books and his tape decks, and then Dean starts packing the rest of it, the stuff Mary didn't even know he had. Sam's eyes get wider and wider as he starts to haul things out of the floorboards, the walls, the ceiling, the false back to the bathroom cupboard, and even then the collection of charms and books on mysticism are less helpful than they might be. Dean packs everything, takes the one picture he's got of his entire family - whole, unbroken. In the picture, Dean is draped over his dad's shoulder, a piggy-back ride slowly descending into good-natured fun, and Mary holds baby Sammy in front of her with a look on her face Dean doesn't even recognize. He thinks it might be happiness.

"Dean," Sammy finally says, out loud when Dean's packing his shit -- his entire fucking life -- into the impala, thankful for the massive trunk space but wondering why his Dad had needed such a bad-ass car anyway. "Dean, _please---_ "

As Dean hugs Sammy goodbye, he wonders if perhaps this isn't the wrong choice.

And then Mary Winchester leaves the house and walks down the steps. Her eyes are red and there are streaks down her cheeks, tracks where tears have fallen. She looks as if something inside of her has broken. "I didn't want this for you," She says, and it looks like she wants to follow that with _you're too young_ and _it's not your responsibility_ like she always does when she has this fight with Dean, but she doesn't. Instead she hugs him and gives him a book he's never seen before, "It was your grandfather's," she says, by way of explanation. "He would have been proud of you, Dean---"

-

Dean's a little freaked when his first teacher starts off by saying she's heard so much about him, and then she tells him about the scholarship, about how it's only available to applicants without classical education and training, and how after seeing his audition the panel had raved about him. It's pretty weird to think about it, because for Dean moving is like breathing, he does it without thought, but apparently he dances with passion and rage, raw emotion and other words he's not quite sure are quantifiable qualities.

His roommate is tiny, blond thing, a classically trained _danseur_ , and he speaks with a lisp and hits on Dean less than an hour after he arrives. Dean, who had managed to adjust to the culture shock about six seconds after his own arrival, rolls his eyes and says "You're actually not my type," and his roommate (his name is Stephen, but Dean doesn't learn this for two more days) sulks quietly until he realizes that Dean's not really bothered by it.

"Dude," Dean explains, months later, when Stephen and him are not quite friends but at least close enough that Stephen knows Sammy's name and why he should always, always give Dean the phone if he calls. "Everybody hits on me. I'm kind of used to it," 

And Stephen stares at him, wide-eyed, incredulous at Dean's arrogance. "You can _not_ be this arrogant, sweetheart," he lisps.

"I'm at Julliard," Dean reminds him, gently. "Most of the guys are gay, and most of the chicks are straight. If I want to get laid, I can. Even some of the teachers have--" and he laughs when Stephen interrupts him to yell at his lack of brains, because the story has been told and re-told often enough that Dean's not sure he remembers what actually _happened_.

"Celibacy is fucking with your ability to reason," Stephen scoffs. "Turning down Mr. Liberatto is a crime against sex," and he doesn't talk to Dean for almost two hours, pretending pissiness.

Dean laughs at him.

-

He doesn't tell his family what he's doing, how he gets by, where the money is coming from. Mary doesn't ask, probably because she thinks Dean's an idiot and he'd have to resort to like, fake credit cards and prostitution if he wanted to make it on his own. That's not true, of course, Dean's got a full scholarship that will see him through the year, and he manages to pick up a few modeling gigs (embarrassing shit, actually, modeling for underwear is humiliating and _cold_ work) that manage to see him into a comfortable balance in his checking account.

New York suits him, dance classes suit him, he learns to dance properly, and then he learns to break all the rules, and he learns important shit too, like how to fall and not break your ankle (useful when hunting down the spirit haunting the girl's dorms) and how to pirouette, arabesque, to throw someone gracefully into the air and catch them.

He learns a lot more, things that aren't taught in class, like how to tell if someone wants to hurt you (useful), how to tell when someone's lying, the difference between the guilty kind of avoidance and the hurt kind.

He learns a fuck load more than that, because he can't really stop learning. Dean soaks up knowledge like a sponge, always looking for more, something else, something helpful. He might be looking for the demon that killed his father, he might be looking for something else -- He looks up old hunters and asks their advice, pours through mythological books and texts, even reads the bible a bunch of time (it's interesting, he's bored, and there's some weirdly familiar stuff in there), and it's still not enough. His grandfather's journal is helpful, practical, like having the other man in the room with him, saying things like " _Vampires are tough sons of bitches, just jack 'em full of Dead Man's Blood if you can, it makes decapitation easier_ " and " _This is how to build a bomb._ "

There are friends he makes, real friends who ask how he's doing and don't get pissed when he's got plans instead of wanting to come to some party with them. He gets to hang out, talk about girls, and cars, and sports, and some of those friends are surprised when he says, "Yeah, I'm going to Julliard for dance," and some of them aren't.

He wears tights and glitter and stage makeup, gets to stand onstage to a full auditorium and a standing ovation, and Dean does not miss his family at all.

(Until he's offstage and his costars get hugs and roses and candy, parents fondly ruffling their hair and Dean stands alone with his hands clenched at his sides, wondering if he could go fight something. There are no Wendigos in NYC, but there are plenty of dumb shit like gremlins and fairies and pixies, a plethora of ghosts, and the occasional incubus.)

Dean absorbs the knowledge like a sponge, schedules hunts in between classes, starts making protective measures. Other hunters in New York start to recognize him, sometimes just calling him "that kid" and other times treating him like an equal. He puts protective sigils on the door frames, banishes poltergeists and old spirits, new spirits, until there are no dangers of the supernatural sort left in the school, the theaters, the library.

Dean expands his horizons, because he's got money in the bank (modeling is a pretty easy gig, too, as long as he's not serious about it) and he manages to banish a poltergeist because one's haunting the site of his shoot. Mysticism and underwear modeling shouldn't be so easy to do at the same time, but it all ends well and Dean has enough money to retire for a little while.

New York has no shortage of supernatural phenomena, and Dean goes out to fight it, partly because he is good at it and partly because he doesn't have a choice, not really -- as long as those things are out there, he's got to fight them. He's in great shape, better than he's ever been in his life, and it occurs to him that he is actually happy.

And when Ciera wakes him up from a nightmare with a cool hand on his back, Dean buries his face in her neck and tells her, all of it. He starts with _my dad died when I was four years old_ , and then he lets it all fall out of him, the ghosts and the hunting and the denial and the anger, the strange mix between family ties and estrangement, the fucking supernatural nightmare he's living in every day, and the worst part of that is looking up into her eyes afterward.

He expects her to look at him like he's crazy.

She doesn't.

-

When Ciera dies (viral pneumonia, nothing they could do, nothing that Dean could have done even though he blames himself anyway. She might have made it if he hadn't been out hunting ghouls, if he'd gotten her to the hospital earlier, if he'd been paying attention) Dean falls apart.

He barely makes it through the funeral. He leaves right afterward, slumping into the driver's seat of the Impala and then starting the engine, driving away from New York with his foot on the gas. He makes the trip home in fifteen hours, and then he gets a motel room and doesn't even have time to get his duffel from the car before Mary's there with a six-pack of beer and a casserole in a Tupperware dish. "Get your ass back in the car," she says, and she makes him check out and then Dean sits quietly in the passenger seat and he lets his mom drive him home.

Sammy's in bed because it's late, and Dean eats the casserole cold from the Tupperware dish and he drinks beer with his mom, neither of them really talking. She looks at him like she understand what he's going through, and Dean finds his bedroom upstairs almost exactly like he remembers it. He had expected something else, but he smiles when he realizes that Sam - or mom - put it all back together, waiting for him to come home. It still _looks_ like his bedroom even though he took all his stuff. The Zeppelin poster on the wall is the same as his old one, just newer and not ripped in the corner. Probably Sammy's doing, but Dean doesn't mind.

He wakes up to find a taller version of his kid brother hovering over him, wide-eyed and excited. "You came," He says, and Dean ends up half of a non-consensual bear hug and then Sammy's bounding around, grinning like Dean saved a puppy from being eaten by a Wendigo or something, and Dean belatedly says, "I didn't get you anything," and then he remembers that he's awesome, so he adds " _Much_ ," and Sam starts saying shit about how this is the Best Birthday Ever.

Sammy skips school and hangs out with Dean, they sit in the living room tossing popcorn into each others' open mouths, watching old cartoons and joking around. Dean gives him a stack of porn ("Ew, Dean, come on!" Sam yells, red-faced, but Dean politely doesn't notice that the magazines all disappear into Sam's room anyway) and they drink beer and Dean makes Sam fight him. Sam loses, which isn't surprising, although not by much, which is.

"I've been taking lessons," Sammy says, and he rolls his eyes when Dean asks if mom knows. "Yeah," he said. "I managed to convince her that it was like, cool or something to know Judo. Besides, it's mostly, like, _defensive_ ," and Dean rolls his eyes right back at him.

"Still won't let you touch the guns, huh?" Dean prods Sammy in the shoulder with a fork.

Sammy swats at his hand. "Stop it, jerk," and when Dean relentlessly continues jabbing him, he sighs and leans away. "No, she won't let me touch the guns," he looks angry for a moment, "Won't even let me help her research," and then he shrugs it off, as if it doesn't bother him, and starts telling Dean about how awesome his grades are, now that they haven't moved house in two years.

That's Dean's fault, of course, because Mary wants Dean to know he has someplace to go home to.

Dean's not about to give her the satisfaction.

-

Sammy's the same height as Dean, now, maybe a little bit taller - not that Dean would ever admit it - and he eats about as much as anyone Dean's ever seen. His eyes are bright, but his expression falls when Dean starts getting ready to leave again.

Avoiding his brother's eyes, Dean doesn't say, _don't worry about me, Sammy, I'll be fine._ Even if he did, Sammy would worry anyway. That's what kid brothers do, especially when your brother is a pansy-assed spoiled little geekazoid like Sam, which is exactly why Dean doesn't waste his breath. He wonders, sometimes, if Sammy's ever going to grow the fuck up and realize what Dean does -- what their mother does -- is way more important than whatever dumbass dreams and aspirations he might have, but then again, there's a small part of Dean that kind of hopes Sammy'll never get it, because then he can actually have -- everything. If ever there was one person that Dean wanted to have everything, it would be Sammy.

His mom asks him if he needs money, right when Dean's about to step out. (He's not leaving, just yet, he's only heading to the store to load up on salt and butane).

He freezes in the doorway for a moment, before he remembers that he's an adult, that he can do what he wants and doesn't need permission. Dean shrugs and says, _Nah, I'm cool_ , and takes off out the door before Mary can ask him where he's going or what he's doing.

They try their best to be civil, but they manage to fight anyway, right before Dean leaves for good.

By the time they get going, neither of them can remember what they're fighting about, or what set them off -- but that isn't even where the argument goes. It's all angry words, shit Dean can't tell whether he means it or not, just words that barely even make sense to him. It stopped being an argument five minutes in, now it's his mother venting at him and Dean screaming back, both of them trying to draw blood with their words.

"It's _your_ fault dad died," Dean says, triumphant and smug when he sees her recoil; apparently he'd struck a nerve.

His mother calls him a stupid child, ignorant, useless, willful. She tells him things he didn't know, things she hadn't known, says her parents died when his grandfather got too cocky. "You're going to fucking get yourself killed," She screams, and Dean doesn't want to feel guilty about that, even though he does.

He throws her words back in her face, says, "You can't stop me," and "I'm an adult," and "When you die, who's going to take care of Sam, huh?" and she freaks out, throws a mug at his head, missing only because Dean's reflexes catch up with him and he ducks.

Cold coffee and broken ceramic splash over the floor, and Dean and his mom yell themselves hoarse while Sammy pretends to watch TV in the other room.

-

"Don't bother asking me for help," Mary says, and her voice is bitter. She gives him protective charms and amulets, which he throws in the glove box and doesn't touch. The only one he wears is the one Sammy gave him, because Sammy gave it to him.

"I won't," Dean says, grimly because it's an oath, not a flippant statement. He loves his mom. He just doesn't fucking want to talk to her.

-

Dean doesn't go to his own graduation, because there are fucking werewolves in fucking central park, and he ends up with a scar across his back that may as well be a giant fuck-you to his modeling career. It bleeds through his shirt, he throws it in the garbage and his jacket as well, because they're ruined beyond hope of repair.

 _Jesus_ , he yells, screaming, at the wall of his empty apartment. His neighbor responds by banging on the wall and yelling a muffled _shut your duck up_ , and Dean flops over onto his stomach and hopes he doesn't need stitches.

The next day his back is still bleeding and it doesn't seem to be stopping, even though it's sluggish and stuff. Dean manages to call someone on his cellphone, and when Jon steps into his apartment for the first time (Jon's pretty cool, actually, although he has a habit of wearing colourful eye makeup and too much jewelry) and doesn't freak out, Dean decides it might be time to get himself a roommate.

It should be surprising, that he's managed to find someone who doesn't freak at the sight of blood and doesn't mind stitching him up when Dean can't reach, but when Dean asks him about it, John goes tight-lipped and shakes his head. "It's no big deal," he says, even though it kind of is, when he's stitching up a long scar that runs pretty much the length of Dean's thigh, from the outside of his hip almost to his knee. Dean grits his teeth and breathes through the pain, bitching a little bit when Jon won't let him do a shot or two to take the edge off.

"So tell me about it," Dean suggests, hand snaking towards the bottle of Jack's and having it rudely slapped away.

Jon glowers at him, but the glare is without any real heat. "If you pass out from blood loss and alcohol poisoning," he says in the vaguely threatening tone that doesn't deter Dean a bit, "I will do your makeup and dress you in drag, and put the pictures on the net."

"You're an ass," Dean says, but Jon lets him do a shot and then helps him get into bed.

-

Dean's never been much for correspondence but he manages to send an email to his brother every couple of months, and Sam's always too busy to IM or talk on the phone, even though he's far away from their mother. Mary doesn't seem to mind the solitude, girding her loins and throwing herself into the hunt, so Dean's pretty much used to being the black sheep in the family. He's been working a little bit, odd jobs for old ladies in his apartment building, a bit of off-off-Broadway stuff and one show that's absolutely awesome, an off-Broadway musical (Dean's landed a sweet role as one of the bad guys, no singing involved, just a lot of badass dance moves and some trapeze work) but mostly using his days for workouts and hunts.

He comes home every  night exhausted and sometimes drunk, grinning into his pillowcase, happy and filled with applause and the sound of hundred of people thunderously screaming at him. He likes it, being on stage, he'd never expected to like it -- but Julliard had taught him that much at least.

It's after a show, when Dean's stripped off his sweats and put on a clean-ish pair of jeans, wondering if he should wash his face again (stage makeup is a bitch to get off) when he hears Jon scream. Dean runs, is in the living room in a heartbeat, tackling the intruder to the ground, half-surprised when the man manages to flip him over. Dean's not bigger or stronger, but it takes him about six seconds to realize that he's in better shape, better trained, and a hell of a lot faster and more flexible.

He takes him down hard, mercilessly, and it's not until he smashes the stranger's head against the floor and he hears a muffled groan, "Dean, Jesus," and Dean realizes that it's not a stranger.

-

"Fuck, Sammy," He says, and he stands up and helps his brother to his feet. "Couldn't have called or something first? I might have killed you."

Sammy's staring at him like Dean's a stranger, like Dean's the one who's changed (and it is totally not) but maybe Sammy just never took the time to look. Jon's shocked and looking a little bit pale, like he doesn't know what to think. Jon's never seen Sammy before, never seen Dean fight, and he looks freaked as all hell. Dean takes it easy on him, waving at the door and saying "Go on, I'll talk to you later -- it's my brother, don't worry."

Sam gives Dean a look he doesn't know how to decipher, and honestly, Jon's a cool guy even if he does tend to wear too much pink and leave streaks of glitter on the bathroom counter. The eyeliner could be freaking Sammy out, but if he doesn't say anything Dean's not about to mention it.

There's a long, significant pause, and then Jon either decides that Dean can handle it, or maybe Sam turns the puppy-eyes on him for a moment, because the next thing he knows they're being fussed over. Sam gets an ice pack for his nose and Jon cleans a minor cut on Dean's cheek, before excusing himself with a flimsily transparent excuse.

"Whatever, man, just go," Dean says.

"Yeah, okay," and Jon leaves without a backward glance. "Call me later, Dean," and there's a warning note in his tone, something that means _let me know you're okay_ without being too obvious.

Dean turns to stare at Sammy, who has grown into a hulking neanderthal of a pre-law student, floppy hair and puppy-dog eyes and the general aura of someone who's going to get eaten alive. Jesus. It's _Sammy_ , all right, nothing has changed about him except for the way that everything has changed, and for a minute Dean feels clumsy and tongue-tied, an adolescent trying to articulate his thoughts.

They haven't seen each other in almost six years.

"Dean," Sam says, and he looks hesitant and nothing at all like Dean's little brother. "Dean, I need your help," and Dean wants to punch him in the face, because it's presumptuous and rude and beneath him, really, but Sam's family so Dean won't.

Sammy stares at him, like he can't believe that Dean's standing in front of him, streaks on his face from half-removed makeup and wearing only a faded pair of jeans and his bare feet. There are a lot of words that Dean and Sam could say to each other, but they all go unsaid, swallowed instead by the tension, the silence.

Dean wants to be self-conscious about the scars on his back, his chest, his neck, but he's earned them all. He's twenty-six and a Hunter, and he's proud of himself, dammit. Even if nobody else gives a shit.

"What," he starts to say, and Sam then interrupts him.

"It's mom," Sammy says. "She's gone. Mom's missing,"

And Dean's world falls out from under his feet.

-


End file.
